In August 2022, the U.S. passed the most ambitious climate legislation of any country, ever. As the director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council at the time, I helped design the law. Less than two years later, the Inflation Reduction Act has succeeded beyond my wildest hopes at unleashing demand for clean energy. So why do I find myself lying awake at night, worried that America could still fail to meet its climate goals?

Because even though unprecedented sums of money are flowing into clean energy, our current electricity system is failing to meet Americans’ demand for clean power. If we don’t fix it, the surge in investment will not deliver its full economic and planetary potential.

The Inflation Reduction Act was historic in scale, investing 10 times more than any prior climate legislation in the United States. Our theory was that we could use public incentives to encourage major private investment in areas where technological innovation could pay big dividends. This in turn would make zero-carbon technology cheaper, disperse it more widely, and drive down emissions faster. During two years of intense, often painful legislative negotiations, I wondered whether we would ever get to test this theory in practice. We ran endless models, but the models only get you so far. If we provided the public incentives, would the private investment really come?

We now can definitively say that the answer is yes. Total investment in clean energy was more than 70 percent higher in 2023 than in 2021, and now represents a larger share of U.S. domestic investment than oil and gas. Clean-energy manufacturing is off the charts. Money is disproportionately flowing into promising technologies that have yet to reach mass adoption, such as hydrogen, advanced geothermal, and carbon removal. And, thanks to a provision that allows companies to buy and sell the tax credits they generate, the law is creating an entirely new market for small developers.

But for all of this progress to deliver, it needs to translate into clean energy that Americans can actually use. In 2023, we added 32 gigawatts of clean electricity to the U.S. grid in the form of new solar, battery storage, wind, and nuclear. It was a record—but it was still only about two-thirds of what’s necessary to stay on track with the IRA’s goal of reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

For decades, the biggest obstacle to clean energy in the U.S. was insufficient demand. That is no longer the case. The problem now is the structure of our electricity markets: the way we produce and consume electricity in America. We need to fix that if we want the biggest clean-energy investment in history to actually get the job done.

The topic of utility reform operates in what the climate writer David Roberts has described as a “force field of tedium.” I can say from experience that starting a cocktail-party conversation about public-utility-commission elections is a good way to find yourself standing alone. But if you care about averting the most apocalyptic consequences of climate change, you need to care about utilities.

A century ago, utilities were granted regional monopolies to sell electricity subject to a basic bargain. They could earn a profit by charging consumers for investments in building new power plants and transmission lines; in exchange, they’d commit to providing reliable electricity to all, and submit to regulation to make sure they followed through.

This model made sense for much of the 20th century, when generating electricity required building big, expensive fossil-fuel-powered steam turbines, and utilities needed to be assured of a healthy return on such heavy up-front investments. But it is at least a generation out of date. Over the past several decades, technology has opened up new ways of meeting consumers’ electricity demand. The 20th-century utility model doesn’t encourage this innovation. Instead, it defaults toward simply building more fossil-fuel-burning plants. As a result, consumers get a less reliable product at higher prices, and decarbonization takes a back seat.

[Robinson Meyer: It wasn’t just oil companies spreading climate denial]

Consider batteries. In recent years, battery technology has made huge leaps. Large batteries can charge up when prices are low, then push renewable electricity back onto the grid when people need power—even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. They can be paired with rooftop solar panels to create virtual power plants that balance out the grid, saving consumers billions of dollars a year while helping to meet electricity demand. During one evening in April, for example, batteries supplied as much as a fifth of California’s total energy demand.

Many utilities, however, won’t prioritize installing batteries, and they won’t invest in solutions that let consumers do more with less energy. That’s because these programs lower utilities’ capital expenditures, which lowers the rates they charge consumers and, in turn, their profits. If utilities don’t get paid for innovating, they’re unlikely to do it.

The problem is even more pronounced when it comes to our electricity grid. Right now the grid is old, dumb, and too small. New technology makes it easier to change that. Just by rewiring lines from the 1950s with advanced conductors made of materials such as carbon fiber, we can double the amount of power they move. If we did this at scale, the existing grid could meet all projected electricity demand over the next decade. This tech isn’t science fiction. It has been piloted in the field since the early 2000s. But utilities aren’t investing in it at scale.

Part of the problem is our antiquated system for permitting and siting transmission projects, which takes too long and costs too much. That’s why the White House worked with Senator Joe Manchin and other legislators to establish a framework for permitting reform to be passed separately from the IRA, an effort that unfortunately has stalled in Congress. But the deeper issue is the system in which our utilities themselves operate.

The IRA didn’t fix these issues. We were working with a 50–50 Senate, with no Republican support. That meant we had to pass the law through the budget-reconciliation process, which doesn’t allow for rewriting regulations. And although we were aware of the problems with electricity markets, we underestimated just how big a barrier they would pose to clean-energy adoption. This doesn’t mean the IRA is destined to fail. What it means is that the next phase of the fight against climate change must be the comparatively wonky, unsexy work of reforming our outdated electricity markets.

On a policy level, this isn’t rocket science. In Australia, households are paid for sending electricity back into the grid. Lo and behold, Australia today has the highest rate of rooftop solar panels per capita of any country. In the U.S., state legislatures and regulators in places as varied as Utah and Hawaii have figured out how to pay households to install batteries and send electricity back to the grid. Last year, Montana unanimously passed a law that gave utilities a financial incentive to use more advanced materials in their transmission lines. But these remain the exceptions to the rule.

[George Packer: How Virginia took on Dominion Energy]

The underlying challenge is political. As the incumbents in electricity markets, some utilities have a track record of undercutting regulatory reform. This can include illegal corruption, such as the case of a utility in Illinois that was caught bribing the Illinois House speaker to support legislation that raised consumers’ rates. More often, utilities rely on the depressingly legal practice of using money from Americans’ electricity bills to lobby regulators and legislators.

Utility companies’ most powerful weapon, however, isn’t cash or clout: It’s the force field of tedium. Even to environmentalists, the issue of utility reform feels esoteric and abstract. Yet what in the past may have felt like avoidable wonkery is now existential. Demand for electricity is surging for the first time in two decades, spurred by the spread of data centers. Across the Southeast, vertically integrated utilities are claiming that rising demand leaves them with no choice but to burn more fossil fuels. As recently as last month, Georgia Power won approval to build new gas plants over the objections of corporate customers and consumer advocates.

But the potential for winning politics is here as well. Biden has made leveling the playing field a centerpiece of his economic agenda. The environmental movement needs to tap into the same impulse. The price of energy touches every American family and business. If a utility is trying to bill consumers for the cost of an expensive new natural-gas plant instead of cheaper and cleaner alternatives, that isn’t a fair price—it’s a junk fee that consumers are paying for no good reason. When a utility misuses your money to influence its own regulators, that’s simple corruption.

Shifting this approach will not happen without a new vocabulary and new coalitions. The climate movement must recognize that its primary target is no longer just Big Oil; it’s the regulatory barriers that keep clean energy from getting built and delivered efficiently to American homes. The movement also needs to pressure Big Tech companies, whose AI offerings are driving up energy demands, to follow through on their lofty climate talk by supporting reform in the utility system as well.

Solving these problems will not be easy. But the IRA’s success to date, unfinished though it may be, offers hope. When we get the politics and the incentives right, we can generate change far faster than we ever predicted.

America’s public schools, since their creation, have repeatedly become a locus for our nation’s most divisive fights over politics and civil rights, whether the subject be evolution, segregation, sex ed, or school prayer. After all, it is in its classrooms—in social-studies curricula and civics lessons and mandatory-reading lists—that the country wrestles with how to tell its story to new generations, how to teach kids what’s right and wrong, true and false. And the decisions that society makes about what children ought to learn, or ought not to, have the power to shape culture and the future of democracy.

Thus today we see fights over how to discuss racism in schools, with progressives championing lessons that connect the stain of slavery to modern inequities, conservatives demanding instead that children be taught “not to see color,” and plenty of debate somewhere in between. We see fights over whether first-graders should be allowed to check out picture books featuring LGBTQ characters, whether teens should be made to read literature with graphic depictions of sex, whether the Ten Commandments should be posted inside classrooms. The recent wave of activism targeting schools has sometimes seemed unprecedented in its ferocity and scale. But of course, these types of debates are not new. They fit into a long tradition of reactionary movements seeking to shape what children in America learn.  

This article was adapted from Mike Hixenbaugh’s new book, They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms.

Early in the 20th century, Christian fundamentalists waged a crusade to stop the teaching of human evolution in public schools, culminating most famously with 1925’s Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a high-school teacher in Tennessee was charged with violating a new state law banning evolution lessons from classrooms. With the United States on the precipice of entering World War II in the late 1930s and early ’40s, groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion waged a successful nationwide campaign against popular social-studies textbooks written by the progressive educator Harold Rugg; they argued that the books—which raised questions about the unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S. and advocated for civil rights for African Americans—were “subversive.” Attempts to force schools to integrate in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were met with riots and racist protests.

While researching my book on the latest political wars over public education, I came across a 1981 New York Times article that sounded as if it might have been printed this year. It described a coalition of suburban residents who, “armed with sophisticated lobbying techniques,” were fighting to “remove books from libraries” and replace history syllabi with “texts that emphasize the positive side of America’s past.” The article documented efforts by parents’ groups across the country to “cleanse their local schools of materials and teaching methods they consider antifamily, anti-American and anti-God.” Here was a tale of conservative activists waging a national assault on school lessons more than four decades ago, though that earlier generation applied a different label to the threat it perceived than activists do now: secular humanism.

Rooted in 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinking, secular humanism, as it was originally understood, refers to a belief system that rejects religion as the basis for morality and emphasizes the need to test dogma with science, to pursue justice by opposing discrimination, and to focus on improving conditions here on Earth rather than looking to the afterlife. But in the 1970s and ’80s, it was redefined by white Christian conservatives—much like the term critical race theory, decades later—as a catchall to describe any lesson or book they found objectionable. If a text mentioned the struggle for women’s rights, it was secular humanist; if it mentioned the racism of the Jim Crow era, it was secular humanist.

[Read: The banned books you haven’t heard about]

Also much as in today’s fights, the battles over secular humanism, which occurred in the years immediately following the civil-rights movement, were a response to evolving social norms around gender, race, and sexuality. And just as the protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 incited school-board conflicts in communities with rapidly changing demographics, many of the battles a generation ago emanated from predominantly white but diversifying suburbs, where angry parents formed groups with such names as Young Parents Alert and Guardians of Education. Portraying teachers, textbook writers, and school bureaucrats as liberal foot soldiers in a shadowy scheme to indoctrinate their children, these citizen activists described their cause as one of good versus evil, a framing that stoked passions—and sometimes violence.

The simmering right-wing movement against secular humanism exploded into national view in the spring of 1974, when white fundamentalists launched a political attack on the public school system in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The district had introduced new multicultural textbooks as required by a recent state mandate. Months of protests were led by Alice Moore, a white school-board member and preacher’s wife who argued—while explicitly invoking the dangers of secular humanism—that new language-arts textbooks would teach students “ghetto dialect” instead of “standard American speech.” Picketers carried homemade signs, including one that read I have a “Bible,” I don’t need those dirty books. Angry parents were soon joined by members of the Ku Klux Klan. An elementary school’s entrance was defaced with a swastika. Arsonists attacked schools with firebombs and Molotov cocktails, vandals cut the fuel lines of school buses to keep them from running, and the county board-of-education building was blasted with 15 sticks of dynamite.

The unrest largely died down after six months, but the school board made a concession. All future textbooks in Kanawha County would have to “encourage loyalty to the United States” and “not defame our nation’s founders”—provisions strikingly like those sought by the GOP today. In states such as Texas and Oklahoma, legislators have passed laws requiring that students be taught a “patriotic” version of America’s past and banning texts that depict slavery as central to the nation’s founding.

There are also parallels in the financing of these movements, with support then and now drawn from a large network of conservative think tanks and activist groups. The campaign against secular humanism was backed by national organizations including the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s National Legal Foundation, and the antigay, anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Some of those same organizations remain involved today, joined by dozens of emergent activist groups, such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and the 1776 Project PAC.

Some aspects of the right’s new playbook appear to have been copied from history—including its campaign to leverage school-board conflicts to push for a conservative reinterpretation of foundational rights. With help from conservative law firms, parents filed lawsuits in the 1970s and ’80s claiming that secular humanism was itself a religion, and as such should be barred from schools or balanced with Christian perspectives. Others in the movement simultaneously sought to overturn the principle of Church-state separation that was the basis for that argument. Insisting that America’s founding was grounded in biblical principles, activists demanded that educators present Christianity in a favorable light, that children be taught to respect the United States and its military, and that men and women be depicted in “traditional” gender roles in classroom reading assignments.

[Read: The librarians are not okay]

Although many of these demands were denied by local and state education boards, Christian conservative groups scored major victories throughout the 1980s—largely through targeted lawsuits and local pressure campaigns—before the movement’s power and momentum began to wane, in the ’90s. The biggest win from that era may have come in 1984, when Congress passed a law that included an amendment written by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, prohibiting the use of federal funds for the teaching of secular humanism. Hatch failed to clearly define the concept, however, leaving confused educators to guess at which ideas were or were not allowed in classrooms. As one of Hatch’s aides would later concede, the senator’s amendment was meant mostly as a “symbolic thing.”

A similarly vague warning is being broadcast to educators across the country today, leading many to change the way they teach. A recent survey by Rand found that two-thirds of teachers nationally reported choosing to limit instruction about political and social issues, including racism and LGBTQ topics. Even in states and school districts where Republicans haven’t adopted laws or policies restricting lessons on race, gender, and sexuality, educators say their fear of political attacks has caused them to avoid subjects and lessons that might stir backlash.

Now, in many classrooms, dark chapters of America’s history are being softened or skipped. Some students are being taught a distorted narrative about our nation’s past and present, and books challenging that depiction are being pulled from shelves. All of this is helping shape what a new generation of Americans believes about our country—exactly the effect that anti-secularism activists fought for decades ago.

As it turns out, secular humanism itself may be experiencing something of a rebound as a boogeyman. On a recent reporting trip to Virginia Beach, where I was covering a live taping of a pro-Trump, Christian-nationalist television program, I listened to a young political strategist named Luke Ball bemoan the failure by his parents’ generation to teach children what is good and right. “We replaced Christianity with secular humanism in our classrooms,” Ball said. He then proceeded to blame the philosophy’s insidious influence for much of what the Christian right believes is wrong with the country today—pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, LGBTQ pride flags fluttering outside the White House, drag queens reading to children.

But there was still time to turn things around, Ball said. Conservatives just needed to look to the past and learn from their history.

For a long time, having children has been a young person’s game. Although ancient records are sparse, researchers estimate that, for most of human history, women most typically conceived their first child in their late teens or early 20s and stopped having kids shortly thereafter.

But in recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.

Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.

Singh’s viewpoint is not mainstream in his field. But shifts in human childbearing behavior aren’t the only reason that menopause may be on the move. Humans are, on the whole, living longer now, and are in several ways healthier than our ancient ancestors. And in the past few decades, especially, researchers have made technological leaps that enable them to tinker like never before with how people’s bodies function and age. All of these factors might well combine to alter menopause’s timeline. It’s a grand experiment in human reproduction, and scientists don’t yet know what the result might be.

So far, scientists have only scant evidence that the age of onset for menopause has begun to drift. Just a few studies, mostly tracking trends from recent decades, have noted a shift on the order of a year or two among women in certain Western countries, including the U.S. and Finland. Singh, though, thinks that could be just the start. Menopause can come on anywhere from a person’s 30s to their 60s, and the timing appears to be heavily influenced by genetics. That variation suggests some evolutionary wiggle room. If healthy kids keep being born to older and older parents, “I could see the age of menopause getting later,” Megan Arnot, an anthropologist at University College London, told me.

Singh’s idea assumes that menopause is not necessary for humans—or any animal, for that matter—to survive. And if a species’ primary directive is to perpetuate itself, a lifespan that substantially exceeds fertility does seem paradoxical. Researchers have found lengthy post-reproductive lifespans in only a handful of other creatures—among them, five species of toothed whales, plus a single population of wild chimpanzees. But women consistently spend a third to half of their life in menopause, the most documented in any mammal.

In humans, menopause occurs around the time when ovaries contain fewer than about 1,000 eggs, at which point ovulation halts and bodywide levels of hormones such as estrogen plummet. But there’s no biological imperative for female reproductive capacity to flame out after five decades of life. Each human woman is born with some 1 to 2 million eggs—comparable to what researchers have estimated in elephants, which remain fertile well into their 60s and 70s. Nor do animal eggs appear to have a built-in expiration date: Certain whales, for instance, have been documented bearing offspring past the age of 100.

[Read: Why killer whales (and humans) go through menopause]

This disconnect has led some researchers to conclude that menopause is an unfortunate evolutionary accident. Maybe, as some have argued, menopause is a by-product of long lifespans evolving so quickly that the ovaries didn’t catch up. But many women have survived well past menopause for the bulk of human history. Singh contends that menopause is a side effect of men preferring to mate with younger women, allowing fertility-compromising mutations to accumulate in aged females. (Had women been the ones to seek out only younger men, he told me, men would have evolved their own version of menopause.) Others disagree: Arnot told me that, if anything, many of today’s men may prefer younger women because fertility declines with age, rather than the other way around.

But the preponderance of evidence supports menopause being beneficial to the species it’s evolved in, including us, Francisco Úbeda de Torres, a mathematical biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, told me. Certainly, menopause was important enough that it appears to have arisen multiple times—at least four separate times among whales alone, Samuel Ellis, a biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.

One of the most prominent and well-backed ideas about why revolves around grandmothering. Maybe menopause evolved to rid older women of the burden of fertility, freeing up their time and energy to allow them to help their offspring raise their own needy kids. In human populations around the world, grandmother input has clearly boosted the survival of younger generations; the same appears to be true among orcas and other toothed whales. Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, argues that the influence of menopausal grandmothering was so immense that it helped us grow bigger brains and shaped the family structures that still govern modern societies; it is, she told me, sufficient to explain menopause in humans, and what has made us the people we are today.

[From the October 2019 issue: The secret power of menopause]

Some researchers suspect that menopause may have other perks. Kevin Langergraber, an ecologist at Arizona State University, points out that certain populations of chimpanzees can also live well past menopause, even though their species doesn’t really grandmother at all. In chimpanzees and some other animals, he told me, menopause might help reduce the competition for resources between mothers and their children as they simultaneously try to raise young offspring.

Regardless of the precise reasons, menopause may be deeply ingrained in our lineage—so much so that it could be difficult to adjust or undo. After all this time of living with an early end to ovulation, there is probably “no single master time-giver” switch that could be flipped to simply extend human female fertility, Michael Cant, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.

Perhaps, though, menopause’s timeline could still change—not on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, but within generations. Malnutrition and smoking, for instance, are linked to an early sunsetting of menses, while contraceptive use may push the age of menopause onset back—potentially because of the ways in which these factors can affect hormones. Menopause also tends to occur earlier among women of lower socioeconomic status and with less education. Accordingly, interventions as simple as improving childhood nutrition might be enough to raise the average start of menopause in certain parts of the world, Lynnette Sievert, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me.

[Read: Why so many accidental pregnancies happen in your 40s]

Changes such as those would likely operate mostly on the margins—perhaps closing some of the gaps between poorer and richer nations, which can span about five years. Bigger shifts, experts told me, would probably require medical innovation that can slow, halt, or even reverse the premature aging of the ovaries, and maintain a person’s prior levels of estrogen and other reproductive hormones. Kara Goldman, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at Northwestern University, told me that one key to the ovarian fountain of youth might be finding drugs to preserve the structures that house immature eggs in a kind of dormant early state. Other researchers see promise in rejuvenating the tissues that maintain eggs in a healthy state. Still others are generating cells and hormones in the lab in an attempt to supplement what the aging female body naturally loses. Deena Emera, an evolutionary geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in California, thinks some of the best inspiration could come from species that stay fertile very late into life. Bowhead whales, for instance, can reproduce past the age of 100—and don’t seem to succumb to cancer. Maybe, Emera told me, they’re especially good at repairing DNA damage in reproductive and nonreproductive cells alike.

Some women may welcome an extended interval in which to consider having kids, but Goldman and Emera are most focused on minimizing menopause’s health costs. Studies have repeatedly linked the menopause-related drop in hormones to declines in bone health; some research has pointed to cardiovascular and cognitive issues as well. Entering menopause can entail years of symptoms such as hot flashes, urinary incontinence, vaginal dryness, insomnia, and low libido. Putting all of that off, perhaps indefinitely, could extend the period in which women live healthfully, buoyed by their reproductive hormones.

[Read: Women in menopause are getting short shrift]

Extending the ovaries’ shelf life won’t necessarily reverse or even mitigate menopause’s unwanted effects, Stephanie Faubion, the director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health, told me. Plus, it may come with additional risks related to later-in-life pregnancies. It could also raise a woman’s chances of breast or uterine cancer, blood clots, and stroke, Jerilynn Prior, an endocrinologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. And putting off menopause may also mean more years of menstruation and contraception, a prospect that will likely give many women pause, says Nanette Santoro, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

But several researchers think some tweaking is worth a shot. Even if menopause once helped our species survive, Goldman said, “it’s hard to imagine” that’s still the case. Evolution may have saddled us with an odd misalignment in the lifespans of the ovaries and the other organs they live alongside. But it has also equipped us with the smarts to potentially break free of those limits.